Lame on Both His Feet

The news came from Jezreel, and it was the worst news a royal house can get.

King Saul was dead. So was his son Jonathan, killed in the same battle on the same hill. In the king’s household, somewhere, a nurse was looking after Jonathan’s little boy. He was five. When she heard, she did what anybody would do. She picked him up and ran.

His nurse picked him up and fled, but as she was hurrying to escape, he fell and became lame.

That’s how the boy’s story starts. Not with anything he did. With somebody trying to save him, in a hurry, and dropping him.

His name was Mephibosheth, and he never walked right again.

The Bible doesn’t tell us much about the years in between, and it’s worth not filling them in with more than the text gives. What it does tell us is where he ended up. When his name comes up again, he’s grown, he has a young son of his own, and he’s living in somebody else’s house, a man named Machir, in a place called Lo-debar.

The name is usually explained as something like no pasture, or no word. That’s an explanation of the Hebrew, not a line in the text, but either way it isn’t the name of a place people moved to on purpose.

It’s also worth saying why a grandson of Saul might want to live quietly and out of the way. In that part of the world, a new king often cleared out the old king’s family, so nobody could rise up later with a claim. That’s history, not Scripture. The text doesn’t say he was hiding. It says where he was, far from the capital, in a house that wasn’t his.

Meanwhile, the man who took Saul’s throne was David.

Saul had spent years trying to kill David. But Saul’s son Jonathan had loved David, and before the worst of it the two of them made a promise. Jonathan asked for something specific. Not just kindness to himself while he lived.

Do not ever cut off your loving devotion from my household.

Jonathan died. The promise didn’t.

Years later, with the kingdom settled, David asked a question into the room. Is there anyone left from the house of Saul to whom I can show kindness for the sake of Jonathan?

Nobody came asking. David went looking.

They found an old servant of Saul’s household named Ziba, and Ziba knew. There is still Jonathan’s son, who is lame in both feet.

It’s the first thing Ziba says about him. Before his name, before his age, before anything about him as a person. Lame in both feet. That’s how he was known.

David asked one question. Where is he?

Then he had him brought from Lo-debar.

Picture the trip from Mephibosheth’s side, because the text lets you. A summons arrives from the king. The king is the man your grandfather tried to kill. Your whole family is gone. You can’t run, and you couldn’t if you wanted to. You spend the whole way to Jerusalem thinking about what kind of king sends for the last grandson of his enemy.

He got there and fell on his face.

David said his name. Mephibosheth. And he answered the only thing he could think to answer. I am your servant.

David’s first words to him were four words. Do not be afraid.

Then: Surely I will show you kindness for the sake of your father Jonathan. I will restore to you all the land of your grandfather Saul, and you will always eat at my table.

The land back. A seat at the king’s table, not once, but every day.

Mephibosheth bowed again, and said what he’d been rehearsing, or maybe what he’d believed for years without having to say it.

What is your servant, that you should show regard for a dead dog like me?

A dead dog. Not even a live one. It’s as low as the language goes.

David didn’t argue with him. He didn’t give a speech about his worth. He turned to Ziba and made arrangements: Ziba and his fifteen sons and twenty servants would farm the land for Mephibosheth, and Mephibosheth would eat at the king’s table like one of the king’s own sons.

The chapter ends with a sentence that sounds almost like a scene direction.

So Mephibosheth lived in Jerusalem, because he always ate at the king’s table, and he was lame in both feet.

Still lame. The text doesn’t heal him and doesn’t pretend he was healed. It puts him at the table with his feet under it, the same feet, every day.

The story doesn’t stop at the table, and what comes next is messy.

Years later David’s own son Absalom rebelled, and David fled Jerusalem on foot, weeping. On the way out, Ziba met him with donkeys and bread and wine for the road. David asked where Mephibosheth was. Ziba said he’d stayed behind in Jerusalem, hoping the kingdom would come back to Saul’s house. David, in the worst hour of his life, believed it, and gave Ziba everything that had been Mephibosheth’s.

When the rebellion was over and David came home, Mephibosheth came down to meet him. The text notes something odd about him. He hadn’t cared for his feet, trimmed his mustache or washed his clothes since the day the king left, until the day he came back in peace.

His story was different. He had meant to saddle a donkey and ride out with the king, he said, because I am lame, and couldn’t go on foot. My servant Ziba deceived me. Ziba had gone without him and then told the king a story about him. He was left behind by the very thing that had always left him behind.

The text never tells us for certain which man was telling the truth. David doesn’t seem sure either. He split the difference. You and Ziba are to divide the land.

And Mephibosheth said the line that makes the whole story.

Instead, since my lord the king has safely come to his own house, let Ziba take it all!

Let him have it. The land didn’t matter. The king was home.

That’s the part worth noticing. The man who once called himself a dead dog had stopped keeping score. Not because anybody talked him out of his opinion of himself. Because he’d spent years at a table he never earned, and somewhere in there he stopped needing the land to prove anything.

He was sought for somebody else’s sake. For Jonathan’s. Which means the kindness was never about his feet, and there was nothing about his feet that could lose it.

Even when the kingdom later went through a terrible reckoning with Saul’s family, the text makes a point of it. Now the king spared Mephibosheth. The reason given is the promise between David and Jonathan. It held, for the length of his life, for a reason that was never his.

Where this meets your week

The first thing people say about you. For Ziba, the first thing about Mephibosheth was his feet. There may be a first thing about you. The divorce. The diagnosis. The one who left the church. It gets said before your name, and after enough years you start saying it first yourself. The next time you introduce yourself to someone, or even to him, notice what you lead with. Try leading with your name.

The invitation you’ve been turning down. Somebody keeps asking you to dinner, to the lake, to their kid’s graduation, and you keep finding reasons. Some of it is honest. Some of it is Lo-debar: it’s easier to stay where nobody expects anything. Say yes to one of them this week. Go, and eat, and don’t explain yourself at the door.

The person who left you behind. Mephibosheth got left behind by someone who was supposed to saddle the donkey, and then lied about it. You may have one of those. The record never fully settles his case, and yours may never get settled either. Ask yourself honestly what you still need back from that person. If the answer is all of it, write that down. If there’s some of it you could let them keep, write that down too.

Stopping the count. There’s a kind of tired that comes from keeping the ledger: what you’re owed, what was taken, who got the land. The ledger isn’t wrong. It’s just heavy. Pick one small thing on it, a debt, a slight, an old unfairness, and say let them keep it. Just one. Out loud, or on paper, and then leave it there.

Take the seat.

This week, when somebody offers you a place, a meal, a ride, a hand, a kindness you didn’t earn, take it. Skip the speech about why you shouldn’t. You don’t have to agree that you deserve it. Mephibosheth never said he did. He just kept showing up at the table.

The last time the text mentions him, it isn’t about anything he did. It’s about a promise two other men made before he could walk.

Because of the oath before the LORD between David and Jonathan.